Tomorrow I’ll be on a panel at the ever-brilliant Social Media Influence about social commerce. Often at conferences I will publish notes and slides as I go on stage or slightly afterwards, but this time I thought I would post my notes and thoughts up early. Any thoughts, additions and criticisms would be very welcome…

Does the term stand up?

First up, what is it? Our working definition of social commerce at Brilliant Noise is:

Social commerce is the use of social media in business, specifically relating to customer acquisition and new commercial models made possible by social media. In terms of customer acquisition, the opportunity is seen as either:

Direct: Customers making purchases in social media spaces, repsonding to promotions or using tools to guide purchase decisions.

Advocacy: Customers recommending a service to their friends / social networks.

These are the notes and slides for my talk at Internet World Kongress & Fachmesse, given today in Munich. I believe a livestream of the talk is available on the website and there may also be an archive with slides.

We’re having some fun here, but just a bit. So obviously, I am talking to a room of digital marketers, so the idea of being at the leading edge is attractive, so is the idea that they have the stuff that is required to be the leaders of their wider organsiations.

The point is that they are closest in some ways to the web’s disruption of business. They have the tools and the need to adapt fastest, so the insights they gain may be what business as whole needs.

Business as usual to revolution as usual

The context is that we are living and will be living in a time of constant change, of permanent revolution.

Marc Andreesen explain this particularly well – as I’ve mentioned before. The web is pure software, we can keep reinventing it.

The Everywhere Web

Buzzwords are the hamster wheel of digital media and thinking clearly. We spend a lot of energy getting nowhere.

Two or three years ago, after a talks about Twitter people were asking what’s the next big thing after Twitter?

Better to udnerstand the big trends and call them what they are. I think about the social web, the data deluge and the everywhere web as the big meta trends.

Networks Thinking

We need to level up our thinking to deal with complexity. A friend of mine studying creativity at Goldsmiths introduced me to “threshold concepts”. they are ideas you really have to grasp before you can understand a whole lot of other things.

Networks are one of these, perhaps the most important for our age. We think we understand networks, but we really don’t a lot of the time.

When you are a German learning English you realise there are “false friends”, (“falsche Freunde“) words which sound or look the same in both languages but mean different things, e.g. “Gift” in German means “poison” rather than a present.

We don’t grasp how magnificently, terrifyingly complex networks are. We like to draw pictures of them and then think we’ve captured their meaning, when they are more like the weather – always changing, hyper-complex. Predictable if you are smart and have a huge amount of data and training, but only to a point and only some of the time. (There’s mileage in that weather forecasting analogy – I’d like to come up with it.

Platform-ism

One of the traps we fall into when we are thinking about networks is “platform-ism”.

We see Facebook as a proxy for the web, as a our new TV channel, we see Likes or Fans or Followers on Twitter as the gauge of our success without taking the time to understand our networks.

Accidental influencers

Another mistake we make is to think that influence is something fairly straightforward in networks.

To be sure there is a celebrity effect – when someone with a huge amount of followers on Twitter plugs a charity or website it gets a lot of traffic (sometimes). But influence is not as predictable or as straightforward as we think.

We fall prey to what psychologists call “narrative bias” – we think we see how things work, think it is obvious after the facts. Duncan Watts’s new book will deal with this subject in some detail.

These are the notes and slides for my talk at Internet World Kongress & Fachmesse, given today in Munich. I believe a livestream of the talk is available on the website and there may also be an archive with slides.

We’re having some fun here, but just a bit. So obviously, I am talking to a room of digital marketers, so the idea of being at the leading edge is attractive, so is the idea that they have the stuff that is required to be the leaders of their wider organsiations.

The point is that they are closest in some ways to the web’s disruption of business. They have the tools and the need to adapt fastest, so the insights they gain may be what business as whole needs.

Business as usual to revolution as usual

The context is that we are living and will be living in a time of constant change, of permanent revolution.

Marc Andreesen explain this particularly well – as I’ve mentioned before. The web is pure software, we can keep reinventing it.

The Everywhere Web

Buzzwords are the hamster wheel of digital media and thinking clearly. We spend a lot of energy getting nowhere.

Two or three years ago, after a talks about Twitter people were asking what’s the next big thing after Twitter?

Better to udnerstand the big trends and call them what they are. I think about the social web, the data deluge and the everywhere web as the big meta trends.

Networks Thinking

We need to level up our thinking to deal with complexity. A friend of mine studying creativity at Goldsmiths introduced me to “threshold concepts”. they are ideas you really have to grasp before you can understand a whole lot of other things.

Networks are one of these, perhaps the most important for our age. We think we understand networks, but we really don’t a lot of the time.

When you are a German learning English you realise there are “false friends”, (“falsche Freunde“) words which sound or look the same in both languages but mean different things, e.g. “Gift” in German means “poison” rather than a present.

We don’t grasp how magnificently, terrifyingly complex networks are. We like to draw pictures of them and then think we’ve captured their meaning, when they are more like the weather – always changing, hyper-complex. Predictable if you are smart and have a huge amount of data and training, but only to a point and only some of the time. (There’s mileage in that weather forecasting analogy – I’d like to come up with it.

Platform-ism

One of the traps we fall into when we are thinking about networks is “platform-ism”.

We see Facebook as a proxy for the web, as a our new TV channel, we see Likes or Fans or Followers on Twitter as the gauge of our success without taking the time to understand our networks.

Accidental influencers

Another mistake we make is to think that influence is something fairly straightforward in networks.

To be sure there is a celebrity effect – when someone with a huge amount of followers on Twitter plugs a charity or website it gets a lot of traffic (sometimes). But influence is not as predictable or as straightforward as we think.

We fall prey to what psychologists call “narrative bias” – we think we see how things work, think it is obvious after the facts. Duncan Watts’s new book will deal with this subject in some detail.

These are the notes and slides for my talk at Internet World Kongress & Fachmesse, given today in Munich. I believe a livestream of the talk is available on the website and there may also be an archive with slides.

We’re having some fun here, but just a bit. So obviously, I am talking to a room of digital marketers, so the idea of being at the leading edge is attractive, so is the idea that they have the stuff that is required to be the leaders of their wider organsiations.

The point is that they are closest in some ways to the web’s disruption of business. They have the tools and the need to adapt fastest, so the insights they gain may be what business as whole needs.

Business as usual to revolution as usual

The context is that we are living and will be living in a time of constant change, of permanent revolution.

Marc Andreesen explain this particularly well – as I’ve mentioned before. The web is pure software, we can keep reinventing it.

The Everywhere Web

Buzzwords are the hamster wheel of digital media and thinking clearly. We spend a lot of energy getting nowhere.

Two or three years ago, after a talks about Twitter people were asking what’s the next big thing after Twitter?

Better to udnerstand the big trends and call them what they are. I think about the social web, the data deluge and the everywhere web as the big meta trends.

Networks Thinking

We need to level up our thinking to deal with complexity. A friend of mine studying creativity at Goldsmiths introduced me to “threshold concepts”. they are ideas you really have to grasp before you can understand a whole lot of other things.

Networks are one of these, perhaps the most important for our age. We think we understand networks, but we really don’t a lot of the time.

When you are a German learning English you realise there are “false friends”, (“falsche Freunde“) words which sound or look the same in both languages but mean different things, e.g. “Gift” in German means “poison” rather than a present.

We don’t grasp how magnificently, terrifyingly complex networks are. We like to draw pictures of them and then think we’ve captured their meaning, when they are more like the weather – always changing, hyper-complex. Predictable if you are smart and have a huge amount of data and training, but only to a point and only some of the time. (There’s mileage in that weather forecasting analogy – I’d like to come up with it.

Platform-ism

One of the traps we fall into when we are thinking about networks is “platform-ism”.

We see Facebook as a proxy for the web, as a our new TV channel, we see Likes or Fans or Followers on Twitter as the gauge of our success without taking the time to understand our networks.

Accidental influencers

Another mistake we make is to think that influence is something fairly straightforward in networks.

To be sure there is a celebrity effect – when someone with a huge amount of followers on Twitter plugs a charity or website it gets a lot of traffic (sometimes). But influence is not as predictable or as straightforward as we think.

We fall prey to what psychologists call “narrative bias” – we think we see how things work, think it is obvious after the facts. Duncan Watts’s new book will deal with this subject in some detail.

If you attended – thanks very much and here are the slides (which strictly speaking I should have posted beforehand). For more detailed notes about the detail of the talk, take a look at the post from TEDx last week.

The main change from this presentation’s debut at TEDx Brighton last week was to add a little about the business or management context for thinking about SuperSkills. Moving on from some ways of describing this I’ve used in the past, I talked about analysing the impact of social web on a business across four areas, with the acronym LOOP:

Long term: What are the strategic implications of the web for the next 5 – 10 years. How will it affect the classic PEST elements (Political, Economic, Social and Technological) in the organisation’s environment.

Operational: Here and now in the next 12 months where can social/web tools support operations such as marketing, customer service, sales, research, product development, HR etc.

Organisation: How will different teams be able to work together on social web related projects? How will information and insights be communicated quickly around the company?

People: What are the issues that the social web raises for our people? The line between public and private is blurring,

The feedback from both this talk and the TEDx one has been very positive (please do let me know if you have any criticisms, constructive or otherwise) and I’m going to start developing some of the ideas in a book now. Watch this space for more new son that front.

The main things that people have been positive about (other than the Gotham font) are:

The idea of investing time in learning tools like Twitter, to develop literacy.

How effective the Pomodoro technique can be.

Thinking about social networks as productivity tools at work.

Developing different approaches to work habits and workflow.

The importance of always-on sharing

Thanks to everyone who has shared their thoughts on the subject – it ‘s really useful in working out how a book about this might work.

This post is the extended version of the notes and research I made to prepare for a talk I gave at Local Social Summit 2010. Hence the length and odd format – if you’re thinking about or researching privacy, location and social media hopefully there’s some useful things here. Have a look at my Delicious bookmarks tagged privacy and location if you want to see the raw links…

Privacy is a complicated issue, to say the least. Giants like Facebook and Google regularly trip over it and look uncertain if not clumsy in their approach to it. Individuals are often either surprised to learn that this is an issue for them, or overly cautious about how they use the web.

Even as I started the talk and begin to write this post, I’m thinking of another post I need to write on the subject, along the lines of “designing for privacy”. It’s an issue everyone from developers to media and brand owners need to consider when thinking about the social web.

In discussions I hear or read “Privacy!” thrown in like a rheotorical grenade. Bang! Stop everything! Privacy is under threat, and like motherhood and apple pie it is too precious to put at risk.

I sense that “privacy” is sometimes a catch-all term to encompass things that make people uncomfortable, their unease with social and cultural change that growing numbers of them realise is happening as a result of the web.

These stories are worrying because they raise fears about privacy without looking closely at the issues or giving practical advice.

People are often unaware of what they are revealing about themselves

Geo-tagging your photos can give away a lot of information about you, but many people don’t realise they are doing it. A project by a interesting bunch of security experts called I Can Stalk U is trying to raise awareness about this by using a crawler to gather information about where people are when they post photos to Twitter and then Tweeting an @ message to let them know (see the post about Educational stalking for a related initiative by a secondary school English teacher).

It could well be that it is at a local levels that people face the implications and consequences of online publicness and start to work out where they draw the line between public and private, how the new social norms will work.

If local authorities are happy to abuse laws designed to combat terrorism to investigate and surveil their citizens for petty offences, it is likely that sooner or later we’ll hear of some bright spark trying to use geo-tagged photos and Tweets to prove parents are lying about the school catchment area they live in or not recycling their plastics in the appropriate way.

Privacy is not a personal matter

Writing Me and My Web Shadow coincided with my less geeky friends (“Hotmail friends” as Danah Boyd, once put it) really committing to Facebook, going past the addiction and over-enthusiastic social games phases and starting to use it as part of their everyday lives.

It became clear to me that what I did with my Facebook privacy settings and vice versa affected us all. If I post photos of people online, I make some decisions about their web shadow for them.

Discussion and social norming are required for us to work out how privacy works within our actual social networks. This is something we can and will all take part in…

The notion of people being happy to trade away their privacy is wishful thinking

Many people want to be in control of what appears about them in the public domain. Witness the “whitewalling” trend among young people spotted by (again) Danah Boyd. They want and need access to Facebook, but in order to remain in control of what is on their wall, who tags them where, they close down their accounts completely (temporarily) while they are not online.

Innovation can solve privacy issues

Sharing my location is useful, but sharing it permanently with anyone in the world who knows how to look for it is an unattractive proposition. Services like Glympse set a precedent for handling privacy differently from presuming openness is what people want – you can use it to send your location to people or broadcast it but after a period of time you choose – say a couple of hours – that information is deleted. In a similar vein Whapee is a photo-sharing service that lets you geo-tag photos anonymously.

Maybe “personal data management” is a better description than “privacy”

Obviously it is not – it is not very pithy for a start – but you catch my drift. What we talking about with privacy in the context of the social web is not “the state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people” (as my computer’s dictionary puts it), but being in control to some degree or other of what others observe or how they are able to disturb you.

We need to stay close to users’ perceptions of privacy

Point is, privacy, what privacy is, how people understand it and what they want from it is changing all the time. Different users will have different points of view, different personal policies. If you commissioning or building services and spaces in the social web you need to understand where they are at right now.

Privacy is a design issue

Perhaps I mean an innovation issue, and we’ve covered that above, but I suspect that applying design thinking to how users data, their privacy/publicness will be affected by a service would be useful. It is certainly something to be borne in mind from the outset in the development process.